When input filenames are given, the output files have the same base name, but with extension .html.
You can verify the correctness of the translation by validating the output HTML file with either html-check (1) or html-ncheck (1); neither should produce any warnings or errors whatsoever.
Little attempt is made to prettyprint the output HTML; that job is better left to a separate program, html-pretty (1).
Although some vendors, such as Sun Microsystems, provide clear documentation of how manual pages should be written, many manual page authors ignore those recommendations, and use arbitrary [ nt ] roff markup to achieve the traditional appearance of UNIX manual pages, without actually using the standard -man format commands.
man2html works quite well on Sun manual pages, but may be less successful on manual pages from other sources. In such a case, an alternative may be to use T. A. Phelp's RosettaMan (1), commonly installed as rman (1). That program works on the output of nroff (1), and attempts to guess manual page structure from the horizontal and vertical spacing in order to add HTML markup. When vendor-provided manual pages are available only in preformatted form, as on IBM AIX and SGI IRIX systems, rman (1) may be your only choice. However, when man2html can be used successfully, it can often do a better job than rman (1) because it has a better understanding of the document structure implied [ nt ] roff manual-page markup.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "...">
declaration. The default, if this option is omitted, is -v HTML=2, to select grammar level 2, which is reasonably-well supported by all current browsers.
The version 3.2 grammar is a stopgap, which, despite its higher number, lies approximately between 2 and 3 in features. It was released on 5-Nov-1996 at http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/ in order to provide a stable grammar toward which WWW browser developers could work.
The next version of HTML, code-named Cougar, is under development, and will become version 4.0 when it is finally released. The first draft public release was on 8 July 1997.
There are only four potential differences in the output of man2html for these grammar levels:
Centering is exceedingly rare in manual page files (it is completely absent from all of Sun's standard manual pages), so the default level 2 grammar should almost always be sufficient.
- The output <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "... "> declaration depends on the grammar level.
- At version 3 and above, the SGML entity & nbsp; can be used for non-breakable space instead of the less obvious numeric entity & #160; which is required by the level 2 grammar.
- At versions 3 and 3.2, the SGML entity & quot;, representing a quotation mark, must be replaced by a numeric entity, ", because of an unfortunate error of omission in the grammars.
- At version 3.2 and higher, the output HTML will use <CENTER> ... </CENTER> directives to support centered text. At earlier grammar levels, centering requests are ignored, but the request is preserved in a comment, and lines are still broken as they would be when centered.
Nelson H. F. Beebe, Ph.D. Center for Scientific Computing University of Utah Department of Mathematics, 105 JWB 155 S 1400 E RM 233 Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090 USA Tel: +1 801 581 5254 FAX: +1 801 581 4148 Email: beebe@math.utah.edu, beebe@acm.org, beebe@ieee.org (Internet) WWW URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe
ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/sgml/
in the file man2html-x.yy.tar.gz where x.yy is the current version. Other distribution formats are usually available in the same location. Several other SGML and HTML tools are available in that same directory.
That site is mirrored to several other Internet archives, so you may also be able to find it elsewhere on the Internet; try searching for the string man2html at one or more of the popular Web search sites, such as
http://altavista.digital.com/ http://www.hotbot.com/ http://www.stpt.com/ http://www.yahoo.com/